The ability to detect an acoustic source(s) or target(s) or multiple scatterers covers a broad spectrum of applications ranging from the detection and destruction of painful kidney or gall stones in biomedical, to active target detection in underwater acoustics, to the detection of flaws/cracks in a critical part during nondestructive evaluation (NDE). These applications have at least one common elementxe2x80x94they are based on a pulse-echo principle for detection. The applications are usually concerned with detection, imaging and sometimes destruction (biomedical) of the reflective source or in new techniques for acoustic surgery. In these types of systems, a piezoelectric transducer (PZT) may first transmit a short transient pulse and then detect the echoes received back from the various scatterers.
An aspect of the invention includes a method of decomposing a plurality of scatterers in a medium in the time domain comprising: a) transmitting a time reversed field into the plurality of scatterers of the medium and performing a sequence of time-reversal iterations to extract contribution of the i-th scatterer of the plurality of scatterers;
b) estimating a weighting coefficient of the i-th scatterer of the plurality of scatterers;
c) estimating the plurality of scatterers of the medium with the i-th scatterer removed;
d) testing to see if a decomposition condition is satisfied; and
e) performing a plurality of iterations of steps a through d until the decomposition condition is satisfied.
A further aspect of the invention may include an array capable of transmitting an acoustic wave; and a storage and reversal circuit operatively coupled to the array and designed to receive time series measurement data of a plurality of scatterers in a medium and decompose the plurality of scatterers by systematically focusing on each of the plurality of scatterers and sequentially removing from the time series measurement data the plurality of scatterers.